Three Friday Updates Worth Stealing
7 min readI’ve written about why you should send Friday updates and shared the template every CEO should steal. Since then, the most common reply I get is some version of: “Can you share some examples?”
First, a reminder of why I feel so strongly about these: a Friday update is the cheapest tool I know for driving CFU — clarity, focus, and urgency. Clarity: everyone reads the same why and the same numbers. Focus: writing it forces you to name the few things that matter next week. Urgency: it ships every Friday whether the week was pretty or not.
I obviously can’t share real ones. My clients send me their Friday updates every week, and the best ones are full of revenue numbers, customer names, and the occasional fire drill. They were written for their teams, not for the internet. So I did the next best thing: my BFF Claude rebuilt them as fiction. Every company below is invented. Every number, name, product, and crisis is made up. The structure and the moves are real, and each example blends the habits of at least two different CEOs, so nothing maps back to any one person.
1. The narrative update
This CEO writes to the whole company every Friday, and every update is numbered. The number matters more than anything inside the email. It’s the streak, and the streak is the message: I show up every week, good news or bad.
From: Jordan, CEO of Relay Systems (fictional — they make event-delivery infrastructure for mid-market platforms)
Subject: Friday update #31
Team,
My daughter learned to ride a bike this week. I watched her wobble down the driveway about forty times before it clicked, and the fix wasn’t balance. She stopped staring at the front wheel and started looking down the street.
That’s us right now.
Gut check: honest answer, we’ve been staring at the front wheel. Since we killed the self-serve tier in June, we’ve been heads-down rebuilding onboarding, and somewhere in there we stopped talking about why. So here’s the why, again: mid-market teams pick us because we make event delivery boring and reliable, and nobody else does. Everything we ship should make that more true.
What each team is focused on next week:
- Product: the new onboarding flow live for our first 20 design partners.
- Engineering: retire the legacy queue. One system by end of month.
- Sales: 12 qualified conversations with mid-market platform teams.
- Support: first-response time under 2 hours. We’re at 5.
Scoreboard:
| KPI | This week | Total for month | Goal for month | % to goal for month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New ARR booked | $42k | $98k | $150k | 65% |
| Qualified conversations | 9 | 22 | 40 | 55% |
| Design partners live | 14 | 14 | 20 | 70% |
| Events delivered | 41M | 168M | 190M | 88% |
Me: I’m focused on closing our two lighthouse accounts. If we win those, the next ten deals get easier. That’s the street, not the front wheel.
Have a great weekend. See you Monday.
— Jordan
Why this works:
- The story earns the point. There is authenticity and real clarity. The bike sets up the one idea the whole update hangs on, and “front wheel” becomes shorthand the team will use in meetings for months.
- The gut check is honest. Jordan admits the company lost the plot for a few weeks. Teams can smell spin, and honesty is what makes the good news believable later.
- One focus per team, one line each. If a team’s focus doesn’t fit on one line, that team doesn’t have a focus yet.
- The CEO goes last and holds themself to the same standard as everyone else.
- CFU check: this one is clarity. Ten minutes of reading and every person knows the why, their team’s one thing, and the CEO’s one thing.
2. The operator update
Same audience (the whole company), completely different style. This one is a numbered list of what actually happened, including the thing that broke. Also on a streak — this is #58.
From: Maya, CEO of Fieldstone (fictional — scheduling software for home-services businesses)
Subject: Weekly update #58
Hey team,
Long week, good week. Six things:
1/ The Hartwell launch. We went live with 400 technicians at our biggest customer on Tuesday. A few lessons I want to keep: skip the buzzwords in training, lead with the dispatcher’s actual day, and don’t demo six features when two will land. Their ops lead said “this is the first rollout that didn’t make my week worse,” which is going on a wall somewhere.
2/ Wednesday’s outage. Straight version: route optimization was down for 3 hours in the Southeast. A config change from two weeks ago finally bit us, and what bugs me is that it sat unnoticed that whole time. Priya, Sam, Marcus, and Dev dropped everything and had it fixed by 2pm. Thank you. We’re adding alerting on that whole path so detection takes minutes next time.
3/ What customers are telling us. I read the notes from our last 20 demos and ranked the pain language by how often it came up: “my dispatchers are drowning in phone calls” (14 of 20), “I have no idea where my techs are after lunch” (11 of 20), “we built our own version in a spreadsheet and it collapsed” (9 of 20). Note what’s missing: nobody asked for more features. They asked for fewer phone calls.
4/ Wins. Priya, Sam, Marcus, and Dev, again (see #2). Elena for running our first pricing experiment end to end without me touching it. Jake for a loss analysis on the Corrigan deal that stung to read and will win us the next three like it.
5/ Metrics. Same table as every week. One churned logo ($9k), self-inflicted (see #2).
| KPI | This week | Total for month | Goal for month | % to goal for month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New bookings | $310k | $680k | $1.1M | 62% |
| Weekly active dispatchers | 4,120 | 4,120 | 4,500 | 92% |
| Jobs scheduled | 188k | 342k | 700k | 49% |
| NPS | 61 | 61 | 60 | 102% |
6/ This week I’m focused on: the Q3 roadmap review Tuesday and two renewal conversations I’m taking personally. Help I need: if you have a customer who’d talk to a prospect about the Hartwell rollout, send them my way.
Question for you: what’s one thing we do every week that we should stop doing? Reply directly to me. I read every one.
Have a great weekend everyone,
— Maya
Why this works:
- The outage section builds more trust than the launch section. What happened, why it took too long to catch, who fixed it, what changes. No blame, no spin, gratitude by name.
- The customer-voice section is the CEO doing homework and showing it. Ranked verbatim pain language beats any positioning doc.
- Wins are named people tied to specific behavior. “Jake for a loss analysis that stung to read” teaches the whole company what gets valued here.
- She asks for help. CEOs who never ask for anything train their teams to stop offering.
- The closing question turns a broadcast into a conversation.
- CFU check: this one is focus. Six numbered things, one scoreboard, one ask. Nothing else made the cut, and the team can feel that.
3. The bad-week update
Nothing sucks more than a bad week (maybe a bad month?) and having to stand up in front of the company. But this is when you earn trust and build resilience as a leader. It’s the Friday Update that matters most.
From: Sam, CEO of Lantern (fictional — analytics software for e-commerce brands)
Subject: Friday update #44
Team,
I’ll start with the hard news. Meridian Goods, our largest customer, told us Tuesday they’re not renewing. That’s $140k of ARR, about 4% of revenue, walking out the door in January.
What happened: we won them three years ago on dashboards and never grew past dashboards. Their new COO consolidated vendors, and we weren’t in enough workflows to survive the cut. Six people there loved us. The other two hundred never logged in. We lost on breadth of adoption, and no product fix would have saved it.
What changes: Dana is building an adoption review for our top 20 accounts, first pass by next Friday. I’m personally calling the top ten this month. If there’s another Meridian in the base, I want to find it before their COO does.
What doesn’t change: the roadmap, the hiring plan, and the March targets. We planned for churn we hoped wouldn’t come. It came. We can absorb it.
The numbers, including the ugly ones:
| KPI | This week | Total for month | Goal for month | % to goal for month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New bookings | $95k | $430k | $790k | 54% |
| Pipeline created | $310k | $1.3M | $2.2M | 59% |
| Renewals closed | $60k | $110k | $240k | 46% |
| Weekly active brands | 1,840 | 1,850 | 1,920 | 96% |
Wins anyway: Owen caught a billing bug before it hit 40 customers. Nadia ran the fastest implementation we’ve ever done, 11 days from signature to live. Both of those matter more this week, not less.
If you’re worried about what Meridian means, ask me directly, in Monday’s all-hands or in my DMs. I’d rather answer a hard question in front of everyone than have it live in side channels.
Have a good weekend. We’re fine. Back to work Monday.
— Sam
Why this works:
- It went out on Friday anyway. The worst week is when it matters most; skipping it means we don’t hold ourselves accountable.
- No euphemisms. “Not renewing,” a dollar figure, and a plain diagnosis. The team already knows something happened; naming it beats the rumor version.
- The table keeps the misses. Red numbers this week are the reason anyone will believe the green ones next month.
- What changes is specific and owned (Dana, next Friday). What doesn’t change is stated just as clearly, which is what stops the spiral.
- The ask invites hard questions in public, because the truth is the truth.
- CFU check: this one is urgency. Red numbers, on Friday, with names and dates on the response. Nobody reads this and coasts into Monday.
The moves that show up in every great update
Different companies, different styles, same underlying moves:
- They’re numbered. #31, #58, #44. The streak is the point. A brilliant update sent occasionally is worth less than a decent one sent every single Friday.
- They’re honest when the week was bad. The gut check, the outage postmortem, the lost logo. Credibility is built in the bad weeks and spent in the good ones.
- The scoreboard never changes shape. Same KPIs, same columns, every week: this week, the total for the month, the goal, and percent to goal, colored red, yellow, or green. Trends become impossible to hide, in both directions, and the team learns the numbers by rhythm.
- They name people. Gratitude with names attached, tied to specific behavior. This is culture-setting, one Friday at a time.
- They make an ask. Feedback, an intro, a customer reference. An update with no ask is a press release.
- The CEO holds themself to it. Their own focus, in writing, where everyone can check next week.
- Lead from truth. Be authentic. Be human. Be yourself. Great leaders lead from truth and embrace their voice. If you’re happy, say you’re happy; if you’re frustrated, own it. If you’re tired and ready for vacation, say it. People follow leaders they believe in and trust, and that trust is built in these moments of authenticity.
Every move on that list is driving clarity, focus, or urgency. That’s the job of the update.
One more thing
If you’re this far, you’re probably going to try it. But know that almost every client initially balks at it – I did when I first considered it. Is there enough new stuff each week? Will anyone care?
But remember, done right, it’s a true win-win-win. You win because you give yourself the balcony time to think strategically about the business. Your team wins, because they have clarity about what’s expected of them. And, your investors win because they know exactly what is happening inside the business and are along for the ride.
So, just do it. Seriously, give it a try and I’ll bet you a chocolate chip cookie (a good one, not a basic one) that you’ll be glad you did.
FAQ
Q: What does a good CEO Friday update look like?
A: It’s numbered, honest, and consistent. It opens in the CEO’s real voice, names each team’s focus, shows the same KPI scoreboard every week, thanks specific people for specific behavior, and ends with an ask or a question.
Q: What KPIs belong in a Friday update?
A: Four or five numbers your team can act on, in the same table every week: this week’s actual, the total for the month, the goal for the month, and percent to goal, colored red, yellow, or green.
Q: Should a CEO send a Friday update after a bad week?
A: Yes. The bad-week update is the one that matters most. Send it on time, name the loss plainly, keep the red numbers in the table, say what changes and what doesn’t, and invite hard questions in public.
